Love, Simon: Your first look at 2018's major studio gay teen romance

This is a big deal. Next March, 20th Century Fox will release a big screen, John Hughes-esque romantic dramedy about teenager in love. The twist? He’s gay.

Love, Simon, based on Becky Albertalli’s 2015 YA novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda and directed by Greg Berlanti (Riverdale, The Flash), follows Simon (Jurassic World‘s Nick Robinson), a teenager who starts an email romance with another closeted classmate (the title is a play on how he ends his correspondences).

From the same studio and producers of The Fault in Our Stars, Simon has all the markings of a classic, mainstream teen coming-of-age flick: football games, drunken parties, school carnivals. But the romantic leads are two guys. It’s funny, sweet, sad and, ultimately, ground-breaking.

Ben Rothstein/20th Century Fox

“There’s this one section of the film where Simon imagines this one boy and imagines them kissing underneath the mistletoe at Christmas,” says Berlanti. “In every other major studio film, it’s always the guy and the girl. And there was something so powerful about it being just a guy imagining himself with this other guy in a film again that was going to be marketed and sold as a mainstream romantic comedy.”